Monkeys In The News

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Four days of clashes between rival tribal militias in the Libyan city of Sabha have left at least 16 people dead and 50 injured. The violence was reportedly triggered by a monkey that snatched the headscarf off of a tribal girl.

The monkey, which belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe, pulled the headwear off a schoolgirl from the Awlad Suleiman tribe who was passing by with a group of other girls, reported Reuters, citing locals.

Awlad Suleiman fighters retaliated in response, killing three members of the Gaddadfa tribe along with the monkey in a wave of violence involving heavy weapons.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Pyongyang's newly opened zoo has a new star: Azalea, the smoking chimpanzee.

According to officials at the newly renovated zoo, which has become a favorite leisure spot in the North Korean capital since it re-opened in July, the 19-year-old female chimpanzee, whose name in Korean is "Dallae," smokes about a pack a day. Dallae is short for azalea.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

The road to a national vote on a new constitution took an unexpected turn in northern Thailand on Sunday, when 100 pig-tailed macaques reportedly stormed into a voting station and destroyed a section of the voter rolls and other documents.

The marauding macaques swarmed into an open hall of the Wat Hat Mun Krabue temple in Pichit Province, about 220 miles north of Bangkok, that will be used as a voting station in less than two weeks. A police investigator and village chief who inspected the site found a third of the voters list had been left in tatters, along with a large chunk of the posted instructions for voters.

It's not clear what might have set the primates on a path of destruction; The Bangkok Post reports that witnesses who tried to catch the monkeys failed to apprehend them. The newspaper adds, "They said the monkeys which were responsible for the damage live in the bushes around the temple."

Thursday, March 03, 2016

Neuroscientists at Duke Health have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows primates to use only their thoughts to navigate a robotic wheelchair. The BMI uses signals from hundreds of neurons recorded simultaneously in two regions of the monkeys’ brains that are involved in movement and sensation. As the animals think about moving toward their goal -- in this case, a bowl containing fresh grapes -- computers translate their brain activity into real-time operation of the wheelchair. The interface, described in the March 3 issue of the online journal Scientific Reports, demonstrates the future potential for people with disabilities who have lost most muscle control and mobility due to quadriplegia or ALS, said senior author Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D., co-director for the Duke Center for Neuroengineering. “In some severely disabled people, even blinking is not possible,” Nicolelis said. “For them, using a wheelchair or device controlled by noninvasive measures like an EEG (a device that monitors brain waves through electrodes on the scalp) may not be sufficient. We show clearly that if you have intracranial implants, you get better control of a wheelchair than with noninvasive devices.”
Full story here. -----------------------------------------

Camera trap footage, taken with no humans present to cause a disturbance, shows one chimp after another pick up a rock and hurl it at the same tree. Rocks pile up at the foot of the tree, which starts to show signs of wear and tear. For some reason, the chimps have picked this particular tree for an accumulation of hurled rocks.

“It was unlike anything I had ever observed among wild chimpanzees,” said primatologist Ammie Kalan. Her team has discovered the behavior in four distinct populations, and it’s possible that more will turn up as they continue searching. What the rock piles mean is an open question, but the discovery of such a distinct and puzzling stone tool use is unquestionably exciting.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Scientists in China say they used genetic engineering to create monkeys with a version of autism, an achievement that could make it easier to test treatments but that raises thorny practical and ethical questions over how useful such animal models will be.

Neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences says his team has generated more than a dozen monkeys with a genetic error that in human children causes a rare syndrome whose symptoms include mental retardation and autistic features, such as repetitive speech and restricted interests.